Tonido not only allows seamless access to your files and media, it truly is your personal hub.

With the latest Tonido 2.10.x release, there is a new feature to customize the apps that are shown in the navigation tree. You are no longer limited by the apps Tonido provides, but you can add your own custom app that is a simple link to another website .

This allows you to get quick access to that website from within Tonido. For example, if you have other web servers or services running in your home, you can point to those too making Tonido a single place to access your stuff.

3) Copy the folder to your Tonido install directory, into the directory called “plugins”

4) (Optional) Edit the manifest.xml and change the “AppURL” value to whatever you want

5) Restart Tonido

6) Your new app should show up in the Apps Navigation Tree

7) Enjoy!

You can customize the icons shown by replacing the two icons that are in that directory, icon.gif and iconbg.gif. You can also disable them from appearing by “suspending” these apps like normal Tonido apps. You can also delete them in one click.

We have started a Tonido Forums thread here, that will have user-created zips for various things in the future. For now, it has a google.com and amazon.com external links.
Feel free to create your own and contribute.

You can now stream a HUGE variety of video files directly in your browser including flv, mov, mp4, mp4v, m4v, 3gp, 3g2,mpg, mkv, avi, dat, wmv and vob. See an example below:

You get to watch a video in your browser when you double-click the file in the explorer view. Once the video starts playing, double-clicking the video playback area will make it go to full screen. Double-clicking again will exit out of full screen.

If you have a fast enough upload bandwidth, you might be able to view your videos remotely, but otherwise, you might find that your connection is too slow to transmit video.

However, video will work great over the LAN without any issues as long as you use the LAN IP address.

This magic occurs by using two browser plugins. Flash and VLC Plugin. To get VLC browser plugin, you need to download and install the free VLC Player for your OS (We recommend installing a specific VLC Version 1.0.5, later versions have an issue with full screen mode). You can download VLC 1.0.5 from here.

Music! Music!

Not only video, you can now play any audio file through the file explorer directly. Although Jukebox will provide the best-of -breed user experience for listening to music, the built-in music player allows quick preview of any file before adding to Jukebox first.

Photos!

Not only is it easier to preview and play back music and video files, you can now preview photo thumbnails in your browser. And not stopping with thumbnails, you can preview a smaller sized image of the image if you want without downloading the entire image. (And in these days of 12 MP cameras, that’s a big deal)

New Thumbnails View

While browsing files, you can switch to Thumb View, which allows an easier way to look at files with clearly marked file type icons.

New Torrent UI

We are slowly working to get all our applications have a uniform style. So Torrent gets a brand new UI.

Multi-File Uploader

Finally, you can select multiple files in one shot and upload all of them in one shot. This new uploader is now part of the Explorer as well as WebsharePro.

Guest Access for Workspace

As highlighted in a previous post, Workspace now gets guests access, so you can collaborate without having them install Tonido.

Switch between List and PhotoGallery View for Folder Shares

Users can now switch a shared folder view from its default (gallery or list) view to another view.

Mobile Support

This release is the minimum required release for our iPhone app coming out shortly.

There are also other minor bug fixes as always, including the ability to do remote deletion by setting a flag in an XML file (for advanced users only).

As always, this is a significant release for Tonido and we hope to get your feedback and comments as you try out this release and we keep working on building Tonido the best Home Server/Remote Access software ever.

Since our release, Tonido Workspace was a P2P sync application (similar to Microsoft Groove), allowing multiple Tonido users to synchronize workspaces among them. While this was great, many users were hampered by the fact that they had to install Tonido in all their machines and setup a group etc before they can work and collaborate together on a project.

Now, with the upcoming Tonido 2.x release, things are much simpler. You can now give Tonido Guest users access to your workspaces. This means they can access your workspace and collaborate together without needing to have anything installed.

So how does it work?

1) Add Guest Permissions for Specific Workspaces, by clicking the “Add/Remove” link and then clicking on the “Guest Users” link.

2) Give access to Guests for that workspace

3) The guest as usual, logs into Tonido (for example, via the guest link, http://john.tonidoid.com/guest) or through the “Login As Guest” link in the login screen.

4) The workspace link now shows up in the guest’s home page and when he launches the link, he will see all workspaces shared with him and he can make changes to all those workspaces.

Note that, if you have setup synchronization between Tonido accounts for a workspace, that will continue to function as well. So you can share your workspace with guests AND synchronize it between multiple accounts. This truly makes it quite powerful and flexible.

We expect to release this feature in the upcoming Tonido 2.10 release.

After reading the post, it hit me. Tonido workspace is a perfect solution for this problem. My wife and myself use the app to store our family contacts and calendar. Even though it doesn’t satisfy all of Fred’s requirements, the missing parts can be easily done.

Tonido workspace allows you to import your contacts through ical files. You can tag and filter the contacts. It has a family calendar. It also supports tasks, notes, files and p2p synchronization of workspaces among family members. The coming Tonido version will also have a guest user support so that all the family members don’t need to have Tonido in their computers.

Workspace Contacts

Workspace Calendar

Workspace Main Page

The most interesting part of Tonido workspace is that it employs a hierarchical information scheme. What it really means is that any workspace objects (task, event, calendar, notes & Files) can be a sub object of other objects.

If you want a non geeky explanation:

Say you are organizing a Christmas Party. You can enter “organize Christmas party” as a task. Under the main task you can include all the contacts that you would like to invite. You can insert other sub tasks like order food, buy party supplies and send out invites under the main task. Also you can set a calendar event for each of the sub tasks. The app is quite powerful and easy to use. The beauty is that it will help you to streamline your task organization.

Currently the app doesn’t have the email ability as Fred has asked for. That can be added. Also we don’t have the native mobile apps for the application. Still you can access the app from a mobile device through a web browser. We are currently building native Tonido apps for iPhone, Blackberry and Android. In the next iteration we can include workspace support in the native mobile apps if there is sufficient interest.

Like any other Tonido application, Tonido workspace is completely self hosted and you can run it from Windows, Mac, Linux or TonidoPlug. You don’t need to depend on an online service and worry about the privacy of your personal data.

It also can be used as a light weight CRM for startups and small teams. We use it everyday in CodeLathe. I can tell you it is incredibly useful. Check it out and let us know your comments and feedback.

A picture’s worth a thousand words. What about few screen shots of Tonido iPhone application?

Internally, we have been testing the Tonido iPhone application for last couple of weeks. It is awesome and has become everybody’ s favorite. Now we would like to give an opportunity for our users to beta test drive the Tonido iPhone application.

Update: Tonido iPhone app is now available from the Apple iPhone App Store. So you will be able to download for free directly. Search for “tonido” in the AppStore. You can find more details here.

This is a quick guide to installing Tonido on your x86 series ReadyNAS (NXV, Pro, or Ultra) and has only been tested on RAIDiator 4.2.12. While this is fairly simple because the ReadyNAS runs Debian Etch, keep in mind this may void your warranty or cause your device to behave in unpredictable ways. I’ve tested it out fairly thoroughly and had zero problems, but your mileage may vary. Now that the warning is out of the way, here we go.

Installing Tonido on a ReadNAS

* Download and install the RootSSH add-on from Netgear.
* SSH into your ReadNAS and type the following at command prompt

wget http://www.tonido.com/download.php?TonidoSetup_i686.deb

* Then

dpkg --force-all -i TonidoSetup_i686.deb

It will complain about a libfreetype6 being too old and possibly a few other things, but they are all apparently all related to running Tonido on a local GTK session. Since there’s no monitor output for the ReadyNAS, this doesn’t matter.

* You need to run Tonido once to get it to generate a config file.

/usr/local/tonido/tonido.sh start

* Now type

vi ~/tonido/data/configex.xml and scroll down to the section that says

Change the 0 between the value tags to a 1. If you aren’t Linux savvy, type a to start editing, then hit Esc to stop in vi. To exit the file, hit Esc and then type :wq and hit Enter. All done.

* Type

/usr/local/tonido/tonido.sh restart

to restart Tonido with your config file changes.

* Log into Tonido for the first time by opening a web browser and going to

http://IP address of your device:10001

You’ll be prompted to create an account. Once done, you should see your Tonido screen. You can follow the wiki from here on out.

Optional to get Tonido to run at every bootup

* SSH into the ReadyNAS if you aren’t already and type

cp /usr/local/tonido/tonido.sh /etc/init.d/tonido.sh

* Type

update-rc.d tonido.sh defaults

Note that this doesn’t seem to be the direction the ReadyNAS SDK was pointing me in, but it seemed to be the only reliable way for it to start every boot up.

Stopping Tonido from running at bootup

* From SSH, first

update-rc.d tonido.sh removerm /etc/init.d/tonido.sh

Uninstalling Tonido

* If you had Tonido running at boot, do the above steps under Stopping Tonido from running at bootup first
* Then

dpkg --purge tonido

* Finally

rm ~/TonidoSetup_i686.deb

And there is no more Tonido.

Additional Information
Tondio does seem to make the ReadyNAS slightly less snappy than a default configuration on a ReadyNAS NVX. I’m thinking that upgrading the RAM on the device will help solve this. Because of the increased specs on the Pro and Ultra, the hit shouldn’t be as noticeable.

Disabling the torrent client in Tonido seems to have the biggest boost on performance without a hardware upgrade. I think this is because of the mass of tracker requests you get from running it. I had a ton of traffic on port 6881 even though I never did anything with the torrent app, but disabling it made that go away as well as making everything (the NAS console and Tonido) seem snappier.

Performance overall is still quite acceptable for a home user and I can still stream 1080p video off the NAS to playback anywhere on the local network.

Remember to enable port forwarding on 10001 if you want to reach your NAS outside your home network and allow for UPnP if you want to use all Tondio plug-ins (Torrent, etc.).

If you have any issues, please post it in the Tonido Forum.

Courtesy: Acoustician

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